News

The Oscars: Count the Money, Then the Votes

Like yesterday's Super Bowl and tomorrow's Super Tuesday primaries, conventional wisdom will only get you so far when rationalizing the Oscars. But at least in sports and politics, "winner-takes-all" makes definitive sense; "all" means something.

A recent flurry of data from the Oscar beat has me looking for specifics here as well. Academy attention has always presaged a box-office bump for nominees, for example, but what does that bump mean for Academy attention? We can't know for sure until February 24, but if we work backward from Pamela McClintock's industry survey today in Variety, we might learn more than we previously thought possible:

No need to wonder about the box office power of Oscar noms: All five best picture contenders—Atonement, Juno, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood—have enjoyed significant B.O. gains since the awards race hit full throttle with the announcement of Academy Award noms on Jan. 22.

Over the weekend, Paramount Vantage's stark oil epic There Will Be Blood grossed an estimated $4.8 million as it upped its screen count to 1,507, landing at No. 10 overall for the frame. That put the film's [cumulative gross] at $21.1 million—$11.3 million of that figure having been made since the Oscar noms were revealed Jan. 22….

Since winning the Golden Globe for best drama on Jan. 13, followed by the Oscar noms, Atonement has grown its cume by $8.3 million. In its latest sesh, film grossed $3 million over the weekend from 1,367 runs. Cume now stands at $42.2 million.

Juno, No Country for Old Men, and Michael Clayton have each drawn an average of $5.9 million since Jan. 22. They also have the highest total grosses of the five nominees, at $110.3 million, $55.1 million, and $44.2 million respectively. Which is where Steven Zeitchik comes in, writing Saturday at The Hollywood Reporter's Risky Biz blog:

Juno or No Country will win best picture.

That's not a pronouncement based on polling or a discussion with our local tarot card reader. It's based on this simple but little-discussed fact: Since the decade began, best picture has gone to one of the top two domestic grossers among the five movies in the category every single year. … You have to go back to 1999 and American Beauty to find the last time this didn't hold true—the Sam Mendes film was a close third out of five—and all the way back to 1987, when The Last Emperor won the top prize, to find the previous exception.

Nevertheless, even as the numbers surged, Associated Press film critic Christy Lemire discouraged perceiving the Oscars as a barometer of public taste:

Oscar-nominated films are often small, dark and unintended for mass audiences; they're about art, after all, not commerce. But that's especially true of this year's crop, which has little mainstream buzz and among the lowest box-office totals in recent years. … [T]hey've only combined to make about $246.3 million domestically. In contrast, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King already had grossed about $364 million all by itself by the time it won best picture in 2004.

Lemire also notes the Juno exception even while asking if the Oscars are out of touch. Taken together with McClintock and Zeitchik, however, the obvious implication is that the Academy wants its tastemaking both ways. It throws laurels at critical favorites (all of which remain in theaters, thus conveniently adhering to studios' expensive fall blitz and largely overlooking films from earlier in the year) in January and watches where the chips fall in subsequent weeks before determining the audience-sanctioned, critic-friendly title on which to bestow its prestige. While such conservatism isn't exactly news, its omnidirectional pandering—its unalloyed cynicism, really—has rarely appeared so transparent. Everyone's happy, but what does it prove? And why even bother?

So perhaps, to borrow a metaphor from those aforementioned Big Games, the Oscars are about who is ahead on the scoreboard when time runs out. I hope I'm wrong—that an upset isn't out of the question, or at least for a better game.

S.T. VanAirsdale is the founder and editor of the New York film culture site The Reeler.